RetroCity, Vol. 2

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EA founder Trip Hawkins weighs in on those classic EA game boxes -- and picks his faves.

By Levi Buchanan

Welcome to RetroCity, a weekly column on IGN Retro about all things classic gaming. Each week, I want to highlight some amazing history from the annals of gaming. I'd also like to get a conversation going here, too. If you have things you'd like me to focus on in future columns or want to respond to anything you read on the site, please click my name and send me an email. I'd love to hear from you as IGN continues to celebrate the highs (and occasionally lament the lows) of yesteryear gaming.

Last week, I took a peek at the ground-breaking game boxes pioneered by Trip Hawkins during the early years of Electronic Arts. These boxes were designed to immediately seize attention at retail as well as convey the sense of whimsy and dedication over at the start-up computer games publisher. I received some nice feedback for the scans of these classic game boxes, as well as my impressions over what made these boxes so important.

I'm returning with more box scans this week, but instead of hearing me rummage about my memory banks for more childhood fancies, I want to turn the discussion over to Hawkins himself. Hawkins, now the founder and CEO of mobile publisher/develoepr Digital Chocolate, was kind enough to give me some additional history on the cultivation of these landmark game boxes.

So, with no further ado, here's Hawkins in his own words:

"EA's first round of games were for Apple II and/or Atari 800. I made the decision to port to C64 very quickly when we saw that the market for Apple and Atari was limited, and heard rumors that Commodore was hoping to figure out how to make a disc drive work. We plunged ahead on C64 versions before the disc drive existed or had an installed base. The backup plan was going to be using cassette tape to release some of the games that did not require ongoing read-write access if the disc drive did not take off. Thankfully, the drive did take off and pretty soon we had a bunch of C64 games selling well off the shelves at Toys R Us. We did this all pretty fast -- we decided to support C64 in May of 1983 and had 8 games in the market by October 1983.

"The album packages were planned to accommodate multiple formats that used floppy discs, and again debuted in May 1983 with games for Apple II and Atari 800. The album would be the same but we had a SKU sticker that noted the platform and any requirements.

"In planning EA's birth back in 1981, I noted the plastic bags and costly boxes at retail and figured that if record albums could sell at retail for $8, the cardboard albums must be cheap to make. So my original idea was to literally use a real record album, assuming that high volume of records and existing tooling would result in the lowest cost. We went to the world's largest manufacturer of record albums and got additional good news. First, we indeed confirmed it would be very reasonable in terms of cost and have great marketing impact. The additional news was that they would do a new tool and let us design our own layout and size and it would be even cheaper because it could be smaller than a record and use less paper. I came up with the concept of the clamshell folder with the slot for the disc and the open seam on the left side to store the manual.

Click to see a full-sized scan of The Last Gladiator tri-fold.

"We went to a new ad agency, Goodby, Berlin, and Silverstein, and I explained to them my vision for the company and commissioned them specifically to do a knockout job for the album cover for Bill Budge and Pinball Construction Set. I wanted that package to prove the concept and set the tone for the EA brand, and be the reference point for other album covers we would do."

I shared with Hawkins some of my personal favorites -- Mail Order Monsters, Adventure Construction Set, Archon, and M.U.L.E. -- and asked if he would name some of his personal favorites from the library.